Hibernia, Northumbria, Francia were successively the seats of learning in the period of readjustment after the invasions. Men born to Celtic speech, to English, to Frankish learned the Latin culture and transmitted it to the middle age. In the circumstances the writers of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries were primarily teachers; and their chief field was _grammatica_. The language of learning was no longer for any of them common speech; it had to be acquired even by Italians and Gauls as a second language and a superior. In compensation it was universal, halted by no frontiers. The whole western world of culture was a _quartier Latin_. _Scoti_, as the Irish Celts were commonly called, wrote and taught in it by Humber, Rhine, or Loire; Bede wrote in it his _Church History of the English People_; Alcuin was brought from the school of York to apply it to the education of the Frankish empire, and his companion and successor was the Bishop of Orléans, Theodulf, a Goth from Spain. _Grammatica_ became thus more important than ever. It opened not only learning in general, not only literature, but especially the interpretation of the liturgy, the offices, the creeds, and the Scriptures. Charlemagne’s care was to secure a clergy that should be first educated and then educating. The mission of the Church to teach through the universal language of western Christianity was exercised partly through the cathedrals, mainly through the monasteries. In these centuries rose such great monastic schools as Fulda, St. Gall, and Tours. As the physical preservation and circulation of texts depended on the _scriptoria_, so on the masters of the monasteries depended not only specific training for the religious life, but much of the more general training in divinity and most of the seven liberal arts. The monastic slant suggests a narrowing of culture. But the restriction of the seven arts must have been due quite as much to those other conditions which gave the preponderance to _grammatica_. The achievement of the age was preparatory. That the age of preparation was also an age of revival is witnessed best by the outstanding teachers. The _Scoti_ who fled from the Danes to the Continent were remarkable no more for their preservation of the last vestiges of Greek than for their intellectual eagerness. They were a stirring leaven. The greater schools founded during this period, such as that at Wearmouth to which English Benedict had brought store of books from Rome and Vienne, show an impressive succession of teachers: Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus, Loup, Remi, Gerbert.[1] The former three are sufficient assurance that culture was safe; the latter, that it was advancing. A work on the Elements of Philosophy, ascribed to Bede, closes with the following list: